Wall Street protests then and now

In May, 1970, about 1,000 high school and college students conducted a protest demonstration in the Wall Street area against the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia and shooting of student protesters by National Guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio.  In a show of sympathy, Mayor John Lindsay ordered flags on municipal buildings to fly at half-staff in memory of the Kent State students.

Peter J. Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, organized a counter-demonstration in support of President Nixon’s Vietnam policy.  The pro-war demonstrators, joined by many nearby construction workers on their lunch break, broke through police lines separating the demonstrations and attacked the students with fists, crowbars and their hard hats.  They then marched on to City Hall and forcibly raised the American flag to its full height.  More than 70 people, including four policemen, were seriously injured.  Only six people were arrested.

Later Brennan led a delegation of 22 union leaders who presented a hard hat to President Nixon.  This was a signal of the breakup of the New Deal coalition between working people and liberal idealists, which led to the marginalization of both.

In the New Deal era liberal idealists considered themselves the champions of blue-collar workers.   In 1970, many liberal idealists saw white working people and their prejudices as a source of society’s problems.  Some Wall Street brokers had more sympathy for the anti-Vietnam protests than the leaders of organized labor.  In fact, a couple of stockbrokers were hurt when they tried to defend the protesters.

The AFL-CIO was committed to its alliance with Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party and (rightly) to the anti-Communist struggle.  Many union members saw the protesters as a bunch of dirty, irresponsible hippies who were ungrateful for the privilege of a college education.  Many liberal idealists despised what they saw as the complacency, prejudices and lack of vision of ordinary working people.

The chief liberal causes in those days were opposition to war, environmentalism, equal opportunity for minorities and women’s reproductive rights – all good things in my opinion, but all of them causes that the upper 1 percent could and did support as much or more than the great mass of the public.  Few liberal idealists were concerned about marginal people, the ones George Wallace called “the exotics,” and not the struggles of the broad mass of working people and the middle class.

The American cultural divide was symbolized by the TV characters Archie Bunker, the bigoted blue collar worker, and his hypocritically liberal son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivic.

Today the broad-based prosperity of the early 1970s has gone away. Wages in inflation-adjusted terms have declined and workers’ benefits have been eroded.  Labor unions have been under unrelenting attack, and millions of Americans who would like to join unions are afraid to do so.  At the same time there has been a strong backlash against the liberal causes of the 1970s.

Archie Bunker and “Meathead” have come to realize that they are in the same boat.  Liberal idealists supported organized labor’s protests in Wisconsin.  Organized labor is supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Maybe the New Deal coalition can be reconstituted for our times.

Click on Hard Hat Riot wiki for a Wikipedia article on the 1970 attack on Wall Street protesters.

Click on Forty Years After the Hard Hat Riot, a Different Response from Organized Labor to Wall Street Protests for an article in Dissent magazine.

Click on At Southeby’s And Beyond, ‘Occupy’ Movement Boosts Union for a report on Occupy Wall Street’s support for locked-out Teamsters. [Added 11/15/11]

Click on Occupy Wall Street Regroups, as Union Allies Mobilize for a report on New York City labor unions joining forces with Occupy Wall Street. [Added 11/15/11]

The best thing that could come out of the Occupy Wall Street protests would be a powerful nationwide version of New York’s not-too-powerful Working Families Party—a third party strong enough hold the Democratic Party accountable to working people, and to run credible candidates of its own if the Democrats don’t support the interests of working people.

Click on Working Families for the home page of New York’s Working Families Party.

[11/19/11]  One reason why the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s could never join forces with the labor union movement was organized labor’s commitment to the Democratic Party.  That’s still a problem.  The Occupy Wall Street movement is a protest against the leadership of both parties, and the leaders of the AFL-CIO are still aligned with President Obama.  That’s not to say Occupy Wall Street shouldn’t join forces with organized labor to support candidates or legislation that are good for the majority of Americans, just that it shouldn’t become a Democratic Party auxiliary.

President Obama has kept himself at arm’s length from Occupy Wall Street.  He said he understands why people are angry, whether in the OWS or Tea Party movement, which is what an adult might say about an angry child.  It doesn’t mean that he has disconnected from the elite 1 percent.

Click on Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like for a statement of the problem by Glenn Greenwald.

Tags: Labor Unions, Liberals